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A person without actual expertise dismisses numerous accounts by trained pilots who saw this first hand by Googling for YouTube explanations and calling these w

• SerLava 5y ago
  Well, the Pentagon sent us a video of a blurry dot. So it must have been an alien space ship moving 16,000 miles per hour through atmosphere but not heating the air at all
  • dau 5y ago
    The Pentagon didn't send or release anything. They confirmed the publication of an - at least perhaps initially - unidentified object to be a genuine recording.
    • SerLava 5y ago
      It's also the video they had previously fumbled, and spooks are well known to fraudulently "leak" information to get it selectively picked up
  • RobertoG 5y ago
    Not really, what you have is videos and testimonies of surprising things, not of aliens. "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" Isaac Asimov
• mellosouls 5y ago
  The pilots are expert in flying and no doubt in-the-moment aerial observation; but its not clear why we need to take their opinion as final and impartial in post-event video analysis.
  • ctvo 5y ago
    > The pilots are expert in flying and no doubt in-the-moment aerial observation; And the pilots say it's something they can't explain, and have never seen before, on the record. More than one account. The problem is the writer dismisses all of this, and takes the explanation of people who saw only the video. How dismissive the writer is of other's lived experience and expertise in their own domain is what I have trouble with.
  • minitoar 5y ago
    Yes, this “pilots are trained professionals and therefore they can accurately identify a meaningful anomaly” does not match my experience of being a pilot or the training I received. It is drilled into you that your senses basically can’t be trusted. Your eyes and your brain will try to make sense of what you are seeing and feeling and that’s fine but it’s up to your higher brain to remember that those systems are often wrong. Your eyes will trick you and you have to use other context to actually know what you are seeing — information that is not always available.
    • quesera 5y ago
      Exactly. Pilots are highly trained, but they are not experts in everything (physics, atmospheric science). At the end of the day, everyone is fallible -- and even the experts are sometimes surprised. These reports can only be treated as best efforts to fit observed phenomena into an existing framework of (inherently limited) understanding. When the phenomenon is adequately oddball, you have to expect an increased level of misinterpretation. See also: doctors, scientists, infosec practitioners, ... Clearly, this is adequate justification for collection of additional data, but it's not enough to draw conclusions from.
  • buzzin__ 5y ago
    If a pilot of a $1000 kite can manage to glue a Gopro on himself, perhaps a $millions fighter plane pilot on a training mission can do the same.
• jodrellblank 5y ago
  The author is a professor of philosophy at Colorado University, no he doesn't work in tech. The people he is calling liars and incompetents are journalists and news media, not pilots.
  • RobertoG 5y ago
    True, he doesn't even mention what the pilots say they saw, what is curious for the case that he is discussing. I don't blame him for his anti-alien position, but his "there is nothing weird here" position is kind of unsustainable. If instead, he would say: "there is no reason to explain this with aliens" and stopped there that would be a perfect rational position. But he solved the problem like this: >>"Utter incompetence: It took me under an hour on the internet to find the above explanations. I looked for explanations on YouTube, and the first video I found referenced Mick West. I then looked up Mick West’s web site, which lists all his videos. That was my research." That was his research. Mr. West also forgot to explain (in the Tic-Tac case) the pilots testimony and, if I remember correctly, the previous radar signatures from the ships. So, a professor of epistemology solve the problem estimating his priors from how he feels about the issue, an argument from authority (because he didn't bother to check if Mr.West get his facts right) and selecting only the evidence that fits his theory. Wonderful.
    • vehemenz 5y ago
      > So, a professor of epistemology solve the problem estimating his priors from how he feels about the issue, an argument from authority (because he didn't bother to check if Mr.West get his facts right) and selecting only the evidence that fits his theory. Wonderful. If there were alternative explanations that were plausible, sure. But they tend to invoke conspiracy theories, aliens, or alternative physics. Maybe other explanations will come around that are plausible, but it is reasonable to settle on the boring, seemingly plausible explanations for now. That's not an argument from authority.
• vehemenz 5y ago
  1. Are you suggesting eyewitness testimony is reliable? If this is your position, then why shouldn't we take ghosts and supposed religious phenomena seriously? 2. Your supposed "experts" are relying on equipment they do not understand that regularly produce phenomena they do not understand. Ironically, I think you've made a good case that philosophers (experts) should be the ones tackling this issue.